Nish Amarnath

The number of fresh arbitration cases filed with the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes last year reached its highest level in four decades, the ICSID said in a report last week.

Dutch company Heineken (PINK: HINKY) said Friday it will pay about $4.08 billion to Singapore-listed conglomerate, Fraser and Neave (SGX: F99), for its stake in Asia Pacific Breweries (SGX: A46), one of Asia's largest brewers.

As Congress makes it easier for taxpayers to collect refunds from the Internal Revenue Services (IRS), scores of crooks have been stealing people's identities, costing the debt-ridden federal government billions of dollars.

Thalia Paraskeva, 24, was getting increasingly desperate. Equipped with a degree in graphic design from Athens, she had no luck finding a job in Greece.
One day, she booked a ticket to Berlin and swiftly packed some dresses, a jacket, a pair of snug boots and a Greek-German dictionary before boarding the plane.

For-profit colleges, which are squandering their resources at the expense of students' outcomes, are bilking the government and the public, a two-year investigation led by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, concluded.

The number of unemployed people across all 17 euro zone countries soared 11.2 percent to 17.8 million in June -- up 1 percentage point from the year before, Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency, reported Tuesday. Euro zone unemployment among people younger than 25 rose to 22.4 percent.

The wheat production downgrade, made after corn and soybean prices reached fresh, all-time highs, is a blow for global wheat suppliers, especially those in Canada and the Black Sea, which includes Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, Barclays PLC said on Monday.

Energy infrastructure company Chicago Bridge & Iron Company NV (NYSE: CBI) will buy The Shaw Group Inc. (NYSE: SHAW), a Baton Rouge, La.-based engineering and construction firm, for about $3 billion in cash and stock, the companies said Monday.

Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE), the world's largest drug developer by revenue, is expected to report a decline in second-quarter profits on declining sales of its top-selling cholesterol drug Lipitor and generic competition for its glaucoma pill Zalatan.

The hefty $7.25 billion settlement that Visa and MasterCard have agreed to, in response to a 2005 class action lawsuit over credit card swipe fees, will disadvantage retailers further and restrict consumer spending in an economy that relies heavily on credit card use and personal expenditure.

Thousands of irate protesters swarmed over Hong Kong's thoroughfares on Sunday and marched toward government headquarters to lash out against a government-proposed school curriculum plan, which they said was an attempt to indoctrinate students by lauding the feats of the Chinese Communist Party.

Global economic uncertainty and the dreaded fiscal cliff have taken a toll on American consumer demand, affecting second-quarter revenues and urging companies to dim their forecasts. DuPont and Co, Texas Instruments, Inc. and United Parcel Service, Inc. are the latest to do so.

Based on analyst estimates, Merck & Co. will report earnings of $1.01 a share on sales of about $12.16 billion -- an increase of 0.1 percent from the year-earlier quarter. The company posts its second-quarter earnings on Friday, before the opening bell.